Movie review: 'The City of Your Final Destination' full of emotion

Friday

May 28, 2010 at 12:01 AMMay 28, 2010 at 4:18 AM

When a film has been sitting on a shelf for almost three years, the usual reason is that the distributor doesn’t know what to do with it. Rumors say that the reason James Ivory’s “The City of Your Final Destination” hasn’t seen the light of day since it was completed in 2007 is that it couldn’t even find a distributor.

Ed Symkus

When a film has been sitting on a shelf for almost three years, the usual reason is that the distributor doesn’t know what to do with it. Rumors say that the reason James Ivory’s “The City of Your Final Destination” hasn’t seen the light of day since it was completed in 2007 is that it couldn’t even find a distributor.

But after finally catching up with it, I’m wondering why distributors weren’t fighting over it, rather than ignoring it.

This is Ivory’s first film without his career-long producer Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005. But Ivory still has his other longtime creative partner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, onboard in adapting the script from Peter Cameron’s beautifully written 2002 novel. It’s Jhabvala’s prowess at capturing the essence of her source material, and Ivory’s visual mastery, along with his innate storytelling sense and his ability to catch and hold onto a mood, that gives the film the feeling of a tone poem.

But the story of an outsider trying to gain acceptance in a very small, very tight family “society” really belongs to the actors who wonderfully flesh out their characters.

Omar is a professor at a Midwestern college who’s trying to get permission from the estate of the late author Jules Gund to write his biography. Omar Metwally (“Rendition”) plays the young man with an eagerness that’s matched by a constant smile, but tempered by the sheer force of his domineering girlfriend, Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara), who won’t allow him to do anything – ever – without her OK.

When he arrives, alone, at the late author’s estancia in Uruguay, he must deal with the man’s brother, Adam (a genial, seemingly carefree Anthony Hopkins), his widow, Caroline (a stiff-lipped, uptight, constantly scowling Laura Linney), and – here’s a nice plot twist – his mistress, Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg, all pouty and suffering from low self-esteem), who has been living there, right out in the open, not a secret to his wife, since he brought her back from a trip to Italy many years before.

In order to write the book about Gund, Omar needs the permission of all three. That’s not going to be easy.

This is equal parts character study and story. As the story plays out, more and more of the characters’ insides and insights are revealed. All of them are, to some degree, damaged people. At a quick glance it would seem that Omar is the most normal, but even he has inner demons under that smile. And they trouble him as much as the demands of Deirdre.

There’s also a generous amount of mystery going on, some of it concerning the suicidal death of Gund. Did he do it because after one successful book, he couldn’t pull off another one? If he did, as has been suggested, start another book, did the content of it drive him to shoot himself? Even more interesting, why are these three people still living in this beautiful but practically sealed-off part of the world, where no one visits, and hardly anyone there even bothers to speak to one another? It gets more complicated. Is there a gleam in the eyes of both Omar and Arden when they first get a look at each other?

Like so many great Ivory films before (“Howards End,” “A Room with a View,” “Roseland”), this one juggles a lot of emotions. Some of that juggling is caused by death and near-death experiences, some by rampant loneliness and thoughts that life could be so much better. The story exists in a place where everything moves slowly, but problems seem to bubble up and get out of control in a heartbeat.

Even with a couple of slightly overblown subplots – one about some jewelry, another about beekeeping – the film is still engrossing adult entertainment. Here’s hoping Ivory and Jhabvala keep working together.

THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION (PG-13 for a brief sexual situation) Written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; directed by James Ivory. Cast includes Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Omar Metwally. Directed by James Ivory. 3.5 stars out of 4.

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